The farce of Filey Road

Published:15:24Thursday 02 February 2012

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RE: FILEY Road fiasco.

Have you tried lately to contact somebody in the Town Hall to ask a question about any of the highways in Scarborough? I did when I tried to ask if the recent traffic problems along Filey Road had been reported to them. ‘Press button number 4’ for highways and eventually a lady answers.

So you start to ask the person your question to be interrupted by the statement “which town are you calling from?”. Well I know where I rang but now it is County Hall at Northallerton who answers the phone.

All things to do with Scarborough’s highways are now controlled from Northallerton. So I here I am trying to explain a problem to a person in an office 55 miles away whose only knowledge of Scarborough is having a bag of chips on the sea front and the map which is in front of her.

She had never heard of Filey Road or the A165 and then to make matters worse I was told that the problem would be passed on to the office at Whitby!

Of course I received no answers to my questions and nothing has been done to stop the problem which I was asking about. Let’s see if any of our local or county councillors actually read about local matters and care about them enough to make a comment?

The problem for me is as usual Filey Road. As all users of this road will have noticed recently the traffic is backing right back up Filey Road every morning. Even if you manage to get further down it is still a long wait at all times of the day. I live on the road and use it a lot so I know exactly what the problem is and it could have been avoided very easily.

The traffic lights at Queen Margaret’s Road seem to be giving vehicles too much time to get out of Queen Margaret’s Road for some reason, but this is not what is causing the present problem. There have been no road markings for nearly two weeks now and this is where the trouble is.

Drivers are using the road correctly as it would be without the bus lanes. This means that they are moving across into the centre of the road for the ‘end of bus lane’ traffic lights far too late and are tripping the ‘bus lane traffic lights’. So every time the lights go red for Queen Margaret’s Road the Filey Road ‘bus lane lights’ go to green and of course there are no vehicles in it so everybody else just has to sit there and wait, causing the traffic behind to pile up.

Go down the road to the next set of traffic lights and there are no inbound vehicles there at all. If covers had been put on these ‘bus lane’ traffic lights vehicles would then have used the proper junction lights with no problems at all.

Then when the roadworks are finished those unnecessary ‘bus lane’ traffic lights which have caused confusion and lane swapping since they were erected could be taken down.

After all there are another three ‘end of bus lane’ sections along the length of Filey Road where all traffic manages to merge uncontrolled and with no problems at all.

Why are we still paying for civil servants in the Highways department and have local councillors responsible for highways when the whole lot has been moved to Northallerton and Whitby.

Also what are we paying these so-called traffic experts for in either our Town Hall or County Hall who organise these major roadworks in our town. Over the last couple of weeks thousands of drivers must have been held up, causing pollution and pointless wastage of fuel for nothing. We all just have to put up with this chaos until the road markings are back down.

But even when the job is completed we are left with the permanent re-surfaced tarmac which is rubbish with bumps and humps in it along the whole stretch from Queen Margaret’s Road to Wheatcroft Avenue.

Where one new section joins on to the one which was done a couple of nights previous beside the pedestrian crossing at Seacliffe Road there is a ridge across the full width of the highway! Unlike the re-surfaced Scalby Road and Burniston Road which are fine. Surely there is a modern day ‘Clerk of Works’ who inspects these jobs as they are being done, seeing as we all are paying for them. What a farce.